The papers in this volume are a selection from those given at a conference of Europhras, the European Society of Phraseology, in 2016, supplemented by further invited papers. As such it provides a useful introduction for those who are not familiar with the research being done by Europhras scholars. The success of this volume may be judged in its own terms, namely the newness of the data and the newness of what they reveal.

The volume is organized into four parts: Part 1 is devoted to data from ‘Lesser-used and areally limited languages’, Part 2 to ‘Languages spoken outside Europe’, Part 3 to ‘Linguistic varieties used in spoken domains and/or regarded as “conceptually oral”’, and Part 4 to ‘Earlier/historical stages of language development’. The selected new data are drawn from the phrasal vocabulary of the respective languages. Specifically, the data comes from: a German dialect geography, Basque collocations formed by onomatopoeia, a comparative set of formulaic patterns drawn from Korean, German, and English, a single Arabic formula, politeness formulae in Jordanian Arabic, three new phrasal vocabulary items that entered the Polish lexicon after the 1989 changes in the sociopolitics of Poland, code switching data in texts produced by English and German bilinguals, legal formulae in late middle and early modern German texts, and lastly religious formulae in letters by lower class patients in German psychiatric institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The newness of the data sets depends on the level of abstraction at which novelty is to be assessed. Although the actual data in each of the chapters are indeed new, they are not a new type of data. The claim made by Elisabeth Piirainen in the opening chapter that phrasal vocabulary has been studied mainly in European languages with writing systems may be true, but it does not follow that new insights into phrasal vocabulary will necessarily be gained by looking at the phrasal vocabulary of other languages. What will be gained is new lexicographic information essentially in the Germanic philological tradition.

This is where this volume's strengths lie. Many of the chapters outline the construction and utilization of corpora and the problems of corpus interrogation for the purpose of identifying phrasal vocabulary items. For example, the paper on dialect geographies directly relates to lexicography, albeit in this case the lexicography of phrasal vocabulary. Again, the study of Arabic politeness formulae is a detailed account of the selected vocabulary items and their conditions of use. The change in the formulae used in Polish after radical sociopolitical change also records diachronic change in the phrasal lexicon of that language. The last two papers on phrasal vocabulary of law and of working class patients in earlier historical periods are also essentially lexicographic in intent.

Much of the analysis involves an initially arbitrary selection of vocabulary items. Why should one pick formulae with religious content? While these are interesting in themselves, and illustrate variation, findings, as with a number of the papers, mirror findings that have already been made previously. However detailed the description of the one word formula that is discussed in the case of a chapter devoted to a single Arabic formula might be, the notion that one word formulae exist is not a new finding. Much of the discussion concerns the identification and classification of phrasal/formulaic vocabulary. Such taxonomic concerns are of long standing in Germanic philology. They are essentially concerns as to what and how rather than why. What constitutes a phraseme in language X? How does one identify phrasemes in the basis of corpora searches? Are phrasemes in non-IndoEuropean languages different from those identified in languages like German?

One paper deals psycholinguistically with code switching in speech production and its import for theories of speech production. It is nicely argued. The new data suggests that code switching, while usually at boundaries of a fixed expression (embedded island), sometimes takes place internally to a fixed expression often when that includes a light verb. This is taken to support both Myers-Scotton's theory of code switching and the Superlemma theory of speech production involving phrasal vocabulary. But what is the role of light verbs in these cases? The author suggests that this has to do with the semantic ‘weight’ of the constituents of the expression. But the question remains how the semantic ‘weight’ of constituents enters into the processes of speech production.

In the case of the new Polish phrasal vocabulary illustrated with three new lexical items, the answer to the why question is simple and made. New social conditions can come to be associated with new phrasal vocabulary items entering common use, but this is not a new finding.

In sum, the main contribution of this volume is to sophisticated lexicographic analysis.